We are readying the build of a rather sweet site and I wanted to ask if anyone had any experience or advice; or if it was even possible with Isotope. I've used Isotope quite a bit in the past and haven't delved too much into extending the available classes, but I think this may be possible instead of building something from scratch.

We have , essentially, two fixed withs; a "wider" and a "narrower" size.

So, the idea and what may be challenging is, we do not want any of the "wider" elements to appear directly above (or below) any other "wider" elements. The other elements don't matter so much. Is this possible to do, and does anyone have any advice as to how to position these wider elements so their distribution through the grid avoids stacking "wide" ontop of "wide"?

Apologize if this seems relatively unclear. Just trying to think of what our solutions may be, and if anyone has any other ideas for plugins, I'm all ears. This will be built with backbone.js and we have a lot of control over the order of the elements.

If you think about the fact that an Isotope .item spanning two columns can, sometimes, introduce gaps in the layout and that you can't control the viewer's browser window size and, hence, the layout, you need to come up with a very complex algorithm that constantly checks for "collisions" and triggers some kind of magic to push elements elsewhere, yet maintaining some kind of order, presumably...
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SystembolagetSep 24 '12 at 23:08

I notice that the stack exchange index makes use of isotope, & you can expand the elements on it. stackexchange.com/sites. So isotope will deal with the different element sizes nicely. This leaves your a task to make sure two consecutive rows don't have a wide element in the same column. I would probably approach this by running code each time you are about to generate a wide element logging its column index and row span. You then check to make sure that any other wide elements within that column have a row span lower than the difference between the two. If not, bump it down the order.
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Ed HinchliffeMar 22 '13 at 14:07